Brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, are becoming more prevalent in the aging population because of increased life span. As US and European populations continue to age, Alzheimer's disease will increase with the US expected to have 16 million cases by 2050. An estimated 1.5 million people in the US have Parkinson's, which affects 1% of Americans over 60 and includes about 100,000 new cases each year.
Although many new PET radiopharmaceuticals for brain function imaging are under development, imaging modalities for the brain such as PET+CT and MRI+PET are insufficient due to poor PET resolution and poor CT/MRI/fMRI specificity. Current clinical PET scanners have a resolution of 4-5 mm, which is insufficient in many brain imaging situations. In addition, current clinical PET scanners are large, expensive, not optimized for brain imaging, and usually are available only in a package with CT. The existing standard PET imagers are bulky devices that are placed in dedicated imaging rooms and require patient to be brought to the imager. Some patients cannot be transported to the imaging room, which could be in a far away part of the medical complex, particularly in situations when they need to be hooked to life-saving and monitoring machines or when quick diagnostic and staging decision is important. In many other situations it would be an advantage to have the brain imaging scanner in an outpatient location, for example in a neurological department. In the current state of the art, brain imagers are bulky and heavy devices and are not capable of providing dynamic high resolution 2D or 3D images.
What is needed therefore, is a compact and mobile dedicated brain imager capable of producing dynamic high resolution 2D or 3D images. The compact and mobile imager should be capable of being easily attached to a patient's head to enable high resolution imaging of the patient's brain.